


Hello, You’re My Very Special One

by fuckener



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 18:58:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is in love with his neighbour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hello, You’re My Very Special One

  
  
It just happens.  
  


-

  
  
Every morning, Sam will step outside and pick up the newspaper and the pint of milk on the porch, turn, and squint into the rising sun to see where the boy who lives next door is doing the exact same thing. His mom always used to tell him to wave at the neighbours, to smile at them, to say hello to the lonely little boy who lived beside them whenever he could - so they wave at each other habitually, and the sunlight hurts Sam’s eyes but if he squints a little more he can always make out the quirk of a smile on his neighbour's mouth.   
  
“Hello,” Sam says, smiling and waving.  
  
The boy flutters his fingers in his funny wave and says in his soft voice, "Hello," says it through his lovely smile - Sam's heart picks up in his chest when he squints and sees it, like it did yesterday and the day before, like it always does, and then they both step back inside their houses.  
  
Sam leans back against the door, holding the paper and milk against himself in his two careful, practised hands, pleased. He and Kurt have been saying hello to each other for a long time.  
  


-

  
  
He cleans up after dinner most nights, when his parents don't make fusses about how often he insists on it. He waves off their offers, takes the stacked dishes out of their hands and ushers them away whenever they do, upstairs to bed or to the living room to watch cartoons with Stevie and Stacey, and then he spends a half hour - normally longer if he can find excuses for it, and normally he can - spends it at the sink, slowly washing dishes while he balances on his tiptoes and cranes his neck to look out of the window before him and the one across from it, into the Hummels' empty kitchen. Waits.  
  
It takes a while longer than usual tonight. Sam bites his lip and stops scrubbing at the bowl in his hands to simply stare for a silent, hopeful moment. Nothing. Nobody appears in the other window.  
  
After a pause, he continues cleaning the dishes, a tug pulling the ends of his lips down into a resigned frown - then he hears fingertips tapping glass and looks up to find Kurt, smiling with one side of his mouth and holding up messy plates in his rubber-gloved hands for Sam to see as a greeting.   
  
Sam laughs, beams, flushes all over. He scrubs the same dish for another twenty minutes before sitting it next to the rest of the clean, dried ones, but mostly he just stands there and pretends to while taking carefully timed glances - Kurt’s hair falls into his face a bit in loose, soft little strands, and Sam likes the way his lashes look against his cheeks when he looks down into his basin, long and dark and hovering over tiny faded freckles - and straining to hear to Kurt singing - mindlessly, wonderfully - while he works.  
  
Before he goes, Sam takes a moment to guiltily watch longer and pushes the tips of his pruney fingers against the glass, his teeth pressing sharply down against his bottom lip. Then he beats his fingers against the windowpane, and Kurt looks up at him, his voice cutting off abruptly on his song like the last few notes have been stolen away.  
  
Kurt smiles and little dimples push at his cheeks. Sam still doesn’t want to go yet.  
  
 _Goodnight_ , Kurt mouths to him, and he mouths it back, lingers another moment, and leaves.  
  


-

  
  
One afternoon, he steps outside to go grocery shopping and next door, Kurt is in his front garden, kneeling over the border of freshly planted lilies that stand against the front of the house and watering them in measured tips of his hand while he gently thumbs over the petals, almost reverently. Sam stops in his tracks. He has a sudden, vivid memory of a woman standing where Kurt is in a garden much more colourful and alive with her dark hair messily tied up, with the same upturned nose and smattering of vague freckles and funny wave whenever she saw Sam bashfully peeking out at him from his front door as her son has now.  
  
“They look great,” he says, voice dry and catching a little on the last word. Kurt’s hair is ruffled from the wind, and his pants are rucked up past his knees so they don’t get dirty from the grass. Sam feels the point of his car-keys pushing into his palm and remembers he has somewhere to be, something to do besides stand here for another moment thinking of what it would be like near Kurt, a thought that seems as oddly unreasonable as the constant distance between them is.  
  
The trickling water from Kurt’s measuring jug stops, and even far away, Sam hears the steady drops falling from it thudding along with the beating of his heart while it pushes insistently, urgently up against his ribs, scarily loud. It only grows louder as Kurt’s head tips up towards him: the whole quiet world around Sam plays a powerful crescendo in his ears and dwindles back into sudden silence when Kurt smiles at him, graciously.  
  
Sam’s hands are sweating.  
  
“I think so, too,” Kurt agrees with a soft, thoughtful hum. His lips curve a little more into a smirk like they sometimes do, the one Sam loves, and he looks up at Sam through the dark fans of his lashes. “But it’s always nice to have a second opinion.”  
  
They say polite goodbyes and Sam drives to the the grocery store with his hands wound around the wheel in tight, painful fists, replaying every moment of talking to him step-by-step and wondering, what if he’d stepped a little closer? What if he’d reached out and slid Kurt’s messy bangs back into place with one of his own hands; what if he’d said,  It’s always nice to be with you.   
  
It hurts a bit. It always does.  
  


-

  
  
Out of his bedroom window, Sam can still see the poster Kurt’s had tacked up on his wall of New York city for the past eight years. Now the room is emptier around it - no more teenage trinkets, no more microphone stands or keyboards in sight - and underneath it, there is a carefully written out hospital appointment schedule. Sam can only tell what it is from the wobbly letters at the top:  _Dad_ .  
  
They’ve never spoken about it - or much in general - but Sam hopes Kurt hasn’t given up on his big dream. He hopes he never does.  
  
If Kurt ever looked out of his window, he'd just see Sam, looking back at him.  
  


-

  
  
The times they’ve been face to face and closer than the distance between their front doors is are sparse for somebody Sam’s spent his whole lifetime beside. He counts them back to himself, sometimes, projects and replays them onto the front of his mind like romantic old movies without any endings. Twenty-four, total.  
  
Every one of them is little and trivial and kept deep, deep in Sam’s heart. He forgets that he kissed a girl once in highschool because it’s incomparable to the afternoon he spent in summer four years ago playing soccer in the front yard with the kids and glancing across at Kurt, draped on a lawn chair next to his step-brother with a book forgotten in his hands, watching him back sometimes with a little smile playing at his lips.    
  
Sam had kicked the ball around after his siblings had gone back inside. Sports was one of the few things he felt good enough at to show off with, and after Kurt’s brother had went back into their house, he’d gave Kurt a grin while he knocked the ball off his knee, up and down and up and down. He’d felt brave. Seventeen and deliriously in love.  
  
Over the cover of his book, Kurt had peeked at him, face red with the sunshine and a fierce blush. Sam could see were the point of his canine tooth had caught in his lip, and he faltered in his trick, the ball pounding off the ground and rolling away from him so he was just stood still again and watching Kurt.  
  
“It was  almost  impressive,” Kurt told him, jokingly apologetic and a little breathless. It was so hot outside, too, hot enough to see the sheen of sweat across Kurt’s forehead; Sam’s T-shirt began clinging onto him tightly, pushing the air out of his lungs.  
  
His lips quirked up a bit and his body got hotter, and hotter, and when Kurt took a deep breath in his shirt slid up, the pale slip of his stomach making Sam’s breath catch in his throat. He had trouble, sometimes, looking at Kurt like he wasn’t the only lovely thing left in the world.   
  
“I’ll work on it,” Sam told him, softly, and Kurt had given him that smile Sam liked to think was meant for him, only him.   
  


-

  
  
There was a boy, once. He would park his nice car just between Sam and Kurt’s houses and Sam saw him a few times, standing on the welcome mat of Kurt’s porch in his nice shoes, with his nice smile, in his nice private school uniform; and Sam had never liked the Dalton clothes, anyway, but they’d still looked much better on Kurt to him. It was before Kurt’s dad got sick, whenever his dad was at work and Finn was out with other people at school who never spoke to Sam - the ones who drove his step-brother out in the first place. It was a long time ago, Sam thinks, and sometimes Sam feels terrible about being so happy the boy’s gone, now, when he knows Kurt is mostly alone. (His dad is ill, regularly in and out of the hospital, and Finn is never around anymore, and his step-mom is too busy working for all four of them to see any of them at all.)  
  
Sam knows what it’s like. (His parents are busy, apologetic, and endlessly thankful to have him, but most of all they're trying to make it so they never have to worry about losing the house again, or the car, or another one of their kid’s college funds. Sam understands, and whenever they bring it up brokenheartedly when the kids have gone to bed he tells them he wouldn’t have known what to do in college, anyway, and he’s better with looking after Stacey and Stevie than he ever was with English or maths.) They're both too tied down to leave anymore.  
  


-

  
  
Every morning he says, “Hello,” and then he wonders about all the things he wishes he could say instead, and most of all he wonders if Kurt would say them back to him; like a simple, easy back-and-forth over milk bottles and papers and nothing dangerous like, “I love you, you’re it for me.”  
  


-

  
  
One night, Sam forgets his keys to the house while he rest of his family are out at a parent teacher conference at Lima Elementary, not too far away.   
  
He fidgets at the door for a while, and although he knows the other ways inside, he takes a moment to prepare himself and then crosses the line between his and the Hummels front yards, instead, his hands squeezed into paper fists. He needs an excuse. He just needs something.  
  
It’s heartbreakingly embarrassing, knocking on Kurt’s door in his pizza-boy uniform, but when he answers, Kurt only blinks at him for a moment in surprise to find him being the one standing there. His knuckles look like they turn white where they’re gripping the door handle when he realizes it's Sam, the boy from next door.   
  
“Hello,” Sam says, and he feels a thrill when Kurt smiles at the word, like maybe he knows what it really means. He takes off his red and yellow and pizza-cartoon cap and runs a nervous hand through his hair, willing it into place some way Kurt would like. “I got locked out my house, is it - would it be okay if I -”  
  
Without hesitation, Kurt interrupts him with, “Of course, yes,” and waves a dismissive hand. Sam’s eyes linger on the flutter of his fingers when they fall back to his side - and then they’re hesitantly reaching out again, curling slowly around Sam’s wrist and gently tugging him inside.  
  
Kurt’s looking up at him with big eyes and parted lips. “Come wait inside,” he murmurs, gesturing his head back a bit, and pulling, again; and his hands around Sam’s wrist are like brands that have always been there, but now Sam can feel them burning into him - and the scared, frantic beating of his heart in his chest.  
  
He lets Kurt reel him inside, breathing softly and trying not to blink. He watches Kurt as they step back inside his house, and Kurt watches him back with an expression Sam isn’t used to seeing on someone else’s face, one that reminds him of too-strong morning sunshine and lovesickness.   
  
They’re inside. Sam can hear an empty house around them and he swallows, thickly.  
  
Kurt’s eyes stay fixed on him when he closes the front door one-handed, the other still loosely clasped around Sam’s wrist, the skin beneath it flushed and electrified. “Thank you,” Sam says after a pause, and his voice sounds far away from him - strange. He wants to say more. He wants to say more than anyone should be able to feel.  
  
“It’s fine,” Kurt breathes, softly. He keeps leading Sam, walking backwards through the hallway entrance of his house that Sam’s never stepped inside before. Everything is overwhelming and just a bit terrifying, but Kurt’s eyes look up into his all the while, big and bright like it’s their first time finding him and as warm as ever. “It’s fine,” he assures Sam again, and his other hand comes up to spread across the side of Sam’s face, his fingertips brushing over the tips of Sam’s eyelashes, the new shades of red on his cheek, thumb sliding low and close to the Cupid’s bow on Sam’s lip.  
  
Sam leans into it, the rest of the world dissolving around them, and he keeps stepping closer even when Kurt has stopped, until Kurt’s breath is light and ticklish over his chin and his heart feels like it’s going to need to stop soon. The hand around his wrist is squeezing, tightly.  
  
“I like you,” is all Sam ends up saying - love sounds better and truer, but too much, hello is too safe and the old cliches aren’t enough at all. He huffs the words out against the tip of Kurt’s nose, reaching up to cup the hand on his face with his own. Kurt feels warm and soft and real against him. “I’ve always - liked you.”  
  
For a moment, Kurt only stares at him, lips parted and so startlingly close. Sam thinks of all the times he’s wondered about the taste of them and the feel of them under his teeth, certain it’s too many times to be counted. Then Kurt’s hands both slide into Sam’s hair and he leans up on tip-toes to press a soft, slow kiss against Sam’s lips, eyes fluttering shut and fingers curling into fists in his hair. Sam memorizes the taste, the feel, the way his blood pounds through him in surges, the way it seems to click everything Sam’s wanted since he was fourteen into place, finally.  
  
“I think you’re it for me,” Kurt says into the parting of his mouth, sighing contentedly and Sam slips careful arms around his waist and thinks he might cry.  
  
He holds Kurt close, nosing at his jawline and shakily breathing him in. “I am,” he promises, honestly, and he feels Kurt’s mouth against the skin of his neck, twitching into a smile that’s just for him.  



End file.
